Human Nature: Born Or Made?

Published: March 14, 2000

(Page 2 of 4)

In the intervening years, this nucleus has expanded to encompass a wide variety of researchers in different areas, including Dr. David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Dr. Thornhill at the University of New Mexico and Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of ''Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language'' (Basic Books, 1999) and ''How The Mind Works,'' (W. W. Norton, 1997).

Evolutionary psychologists have not always carried on their campaign quietly.

They have issued a noisy assault on the way the social sciences have done business for the last 50 years, asserting that social scientists have a collective phobia about possible biological influences on behavior and an obsession with more ''politically correct'' environmental explanations. Some researchers have thrust their work into the spotlight by pursuing topics that seem guaranteed to push people's emotional buttons, rape being only the latest example.

In the process, the scientists have gained a reputation for a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, and a style of scholarly debate so unapologetic and uncompromising that, as one observer put it, ''They just make people mad.''

Perhaps as a result, the scientists' work and occasionally the scientists themselves have attracted no shortage of criticism, from social scientists and within evolutionary science itself.

Critics have assailed their scientific methods, suggested that some work is tinged by sexism and disputed most of the major tenets of the scientists' approach. And some worry that the studies will be misused by politicians and advocacy groups, who are often quick to blur the distinction between theory and fact.

''The fact is,'' said Dr. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the critical review of Dr. Thornhill and Dr. Palmer's book in Nature, ''that evolutionary psychology, except for its barest claims, remains highly controversial, and there are ideological agendas on both sides.''

The Background

A Disturbing Legacy Of Twisting Darwin

At the most basic level, some critics oppose any effort to link evolution and human behavior.

''There are a whole bunch of people who think it's dehumanizing to talk about humans in biological terms,'' said Dr. Robert Boyd, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. ''They think it's just kind of distasteful.''

In some cases, people confuse the ''biological'' approach of evolutionary science, which seeks to understand how genes contributed to the evolution of humans as a species, with the field of behavioral genetics, which investigates to what extent heredity accounts for how traits like shyness or schizophrenia vary from person to person.

But biology, applied to human behavior, also has a disturbing history of misuse. College students in introductory courses are taught the perils of ''social Darwinism,'' a 19th-century theory that borrowed catch words of evolutionary thinking and twisted them into a justification for class differences: the struggle for wealth and power, social Darwinists argued, was a battle for ''survival of the fittest,'' a term coined by Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher.

Darwin's theory, stretched and distorted in various ways, was also called upon by the Nazis as a rationale for genocide, and has been a staple of forced sterilization campaigns and racist propaganda.

In the decades after World War II, the record of these abuses created a distrust of biological explanations for human behavior.

But sensitivity could also turn into virtual censorship, as Dr. E. O. Wilson, a renowned entomologist at Harvard, discovered after publishing his now-classic book, ''Sociobiology,'' in 1975. The book, mostly devoted to a discussion of animal behavior, included a final chapter extending evolutionary theory into the realm of human affairs. It was heavily criticized, and in 1978, as Dr. Wilson began to speak about his theories at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, protesters heckled him and dumped a pitcher of water on his head.

Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist, and Dr. Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist, both of Harvard, have been the most vocal and prolific of sociobiology's critics, writing a famous 1979 paper, ''The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Program.''

Dr. Gould, in particular, has continued to find fault with the work of scientists, including evolutionary psychologists, who seek to explain traits as ''adaptations.'' In fact, he argues, many traits are not the products of natural selection, favored because they enhance reproduction or survival, but are simply random byproducts of other evolutionary developments.

The Issues

Controversial Task, Abundance of Critics

Some evolutionary biologists have also historically opposed applying Darwinian principles to humans, not because they have moral misgivings about such research, but because they think the task is simply too complicated.